Each season, with accessibility in mind, the Mobile Shakespeare Unit strips down a pair of plays and schleps them to under-Shaken New Yorkers—people in shelters, halfway houses, prisons. This rough, gritty Macbeth foregoes the light-footed theatricality and transparent acting of previous MSU work. Instead the company plays in an old-fashioned declamatory style that emphasizes verse over sense and relies on the rhythm to add momentum. A few actors have the resonant voices for this approach—Daniel Pierce (Duncan/Macduff) and Keith Eric Chappelle (Banquo) are particularly easy on the ear—but it cuts against the American style of realistic acting and is tougher for an audience to grasp.

Rob Campbell, in the lead, walks nimbly through Macbeth’s speeches, more of a pensive Hamlet-type than the warrior he’s described as being. Jennifer Ikeda is one of a handful of Shakespearean specialists in NYC but more likely to be cast as Lady Macduff than Lady Macbeth. So, cast as Lady Macbeth, she grabs hold of her opportunity. Her strong, militant portrayal galvanizes her husband and the production. More generally, the company is solid but aside from the witches and Banquo’s ghost, they find few openings to connect with the script or the audience.

The main displays of theatricality come during the witches’ scenes, where prophesies are backed by a scuzzy steel guitar. With its dynamic staging and brisk pace, the show is a little too lean to have its full effect. The speed obscures some fundamental moments, especially the warnings about woods and wombs. This Macbeth is the MSU’s first tragedy, and maybe it shows a limitation of the MSU’s format.

Although the tightly-knit companies I’ve covered recently have produced inventive work, they also have a major shortcoming. Both Fiasco’s 2 Gents and Bedlam’s12th Night were comprised entirely of white actors. I passed on the Wooster Group's Troilus and Cressida (AKA Cry, Trojans!) partly because of its racial politics (the Trojans were American Indians, the actors were white; and that's only the tip of the controversy). Meanwhile the Broadway shows in the Shake-sphere’s orbit, Wolf Hall and Something Rotten, have one black man and one black woman between them.

This is not okay. The plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries are especially suited to diversity in casting. They are rooted in poetry, theatricality, and fantastical plots; there’s almost nothing ‘realistic’ about them, and plenty that’s artificial. Except in cases where race is specifically a theme (e.g. Othello), Shak offers his producers the chance to make their troupe into a utopia of post-racial opportunity.

So Red Bull gets points simply for diversity in casting their ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore. One main role and two supporting roles go to black actors. Their melanin content in no way interferes with John Ford’s vision of an ultra-decadent Renaissance Italy, and their talent abets Jesse Berger’s vision of noble depravity.

’Tis Pity is one of the era’s masterpieces unjustly eclipsed by Shakespeare’s reputation—much better than Titus A. or Richard 3. But then the tragedy itself lives in Shak’s shadow. The conventional description of Tis Pity is “What if Romeo and Juliet were siblings?” Ford deliberately nods to R&J by giving the brother a priest and the sister a nurse as confidantes. He revisits the earlier play’s clash between passion and propriety, but from the complex, equivocal viewpoints of Hamlet and Lear. The play climaxes not with a suicide pact but with a murder/suicide.

On the page and in most productions, the brother is the focus of the action. But Berger’s cuts and direction shift focus subtly to the sister, played with great intelligence by Amelia Pedlow. She shows the self-possession of a good Shakespearean ingénue: feminine and smart, alternately frisky and haughty as the situation demands. Her character can seem like a victim, hemmed in by men’s decisions—father, brother, suitors, husband—but Pedlow gives her loss of autonomy a tragic dignity. In that way, she and Berger give the climactic murder/suicide a proto-feminist slant.

Matthew Amendt portrays her fraternal/romantic stage-partner as a bookish man strung out by his Freudian impulses. He tears into the Marlovian audacity of a character made almost drunk by his defiance of convention. The company as a whole gives broad and lusty performances; their pleasure in such lurid plots and colorful characters drives much of the show’s first half. Indeed, as Ford closes off his subplots to focus on the siblings’ mental agitation, the show loses some of its gaudy thrill. Much of the pleasure from this Whore derives from the broad characterizations, pitched to match a play whose bloody finale has the protagonist stabbing his brother-in-law with a dagger already impaled with his sister’s heart!

Ford and Berger’s ’Tis Pity is a work of aesthetic overload, epitomized by Sara Jean Tosetti’s phenomenal costumes. Take the outfit of the stock idiot fop character: his too-wide ruff, a leopard-print women’s jacket, and clunky black’n’gold heels are fabulously glam while borrowing enough from Jacobean fashion to make the setting specific.

Berger, with his brave cast and savvy designers, exploits the potential latent in Ford’s tragedy. He and Scenic designer David Barbour provide half a dozen entrances to the stage, including a balcony for the heroine. This feature helps him keep the pace quick without tangling the subplots. In fact, this staging is more clear and engaging than many simpler dramas. The interlocking plots move like clockwork. The playing is conversational, emphasizing dialogue and clarity over verse. That’s a smart choice, since the play and production otherwise aim for maximalism. Incest and intrigue has never been so much fun!

Zachary Fine (Crab) and Andy Grotelueschen (Launce)in The Two Gentlemen of Verona

Fiasco’s Two Gentlemen of Verona is a great, rare pleasure, especially for a mad Shakespearean like me: a superb staging of minor Will. I’d never seen 2 Gents and only read it once, back in the mid-’90s. There’s a reason it’s mostly known as the one with a dog. Its plot devices are familiar—a cross-dressing heroine, rings and letters, and a retreat to the forest that loosens inhibitions enough to resolve love’s confusions—but they’re embryonic in form. It's also got a nasty finale, with an attempted rape that's pardoned way too quickly. 2 Gents is easily the worst of Shak trilogy of apprentice comedies (the other two are Shrew and Comedy of Errors), but it points more obviously towards his future as a playwright. The play is an artificial tale of courtly love, Shak’s comic mode for the rest of his career.

Of course it can’t stand up to comparison with his later iterations; 2 Gents is better taken on its own terms or not at all. So Fiasco does that, simply, directly, and brilliantly. Since the verse is obviously written by a rookie, they deliver it in a prosy cadence, focusing on the sentence rather than the line or the idea. The comedians don’t attempt to wring laughs from the quibbles, while the romantics round and shape their roles by adding individuality to the types.

Of the titular gentlemen, Zachary Fine gives the dudley-do-right Valentine a bit of a thick skull, which smooths his friendship with Noah Brody’s scheming Proteus. The women outdo the men (as they should in Shakespearean comedy). As the girl-in-drag Julia, Jessie Austrian shows a great comic/romantic gift as a smart nitwit, and anchors the romantic plot with her screwball charm. Emily Young gives the evening its depth, as the actor who best turns the verse into spoken thought. Her Silvia is a Renaissance socialite who almost instinctively uses her wit to express herself and beguile others.

Including me. Take this bit of courtly courting, where Valentine has written her a love letter:

Valentine

No madam; so it stead you, I will write(Please you command) a thousand times as much.And yet—

Silvia

A pretty period. Well, I guess the sequel;And yet I will not name it; and yet I care not.And yet take this again; and yet I thank you,Meaning henceforth to trouble you no more.

Silvia’s reply is famously tricky to play, since it’s so obviously artificial. But Young gives each “and yet” a turn, like she’s articulating a particularly complex thought in particularly artful fashion while steering to her point: a polite rejection.

Emily Young (Silvia) & Jessie Austrian (Julia)
in The Two Gentlemen of Verona

Finally, there’s the clown and his dog (which, incidentally, Bernard Shaw named as the best character in Shakespeare; unjust, but he is the best in 2 Gents). Andy Grotelueschen, the company’s shaggy comedian, recounts the escapades of Crab, played by Zachary Fine in black clown nose, idiot grin, and Harpo-like silence. The dog’s a dope, the master’s not much brighter, and they inevitably steal the show.

For 2 Gents’s set, Derek McLane suggests both court and forest by covering the walls and ceiling in cherry blossoms and crumpled pink paper. To break up the stage a bit, two neoclassical columns metamorphose into trees. It has the same formal beauty and artifice as the play itself. 2 Gents is a happy collaboration with Theater for a New Audience. TFANA’s home, the year-old Polonsky Shakespeare Center, has proved to be a great space for Shak—comfortable and spacious, intimate yet communal. Fiasco looks to be in its natural element. The cast remains onstage throughout, playing string instruments and donning bits of costume or just enjoying the show with the audience. All this helps the audience to swallow the improbable and fantastical turns of Shakespearean plot. This 2 Gents is a gem, all the better for being smaller and less familiar than most Shakespeare.

Friday, May 1, 2015

This is the busy month for Shakespeareans in New York. The spring shows ring their curtains down (let's hope for a downtown revival of Bedlam's Twelfth Night + What You Will) and summer shows start their warm-ups. Here's the hubbub in May:

A staging of Molière's most difficult, atypical comedy. He still gives you a rascally servant of an egotistical master who gets what he deserves. But instead of bourgeois hijinks, Don Juan raises a popular character to the level of myth. Like Marlowe's Faustus (below), Molière'sJuan wrestles with damnation and earthly pleasures—ultimately it sides with the later, albeit with a strong dose of irony. No notes on the production, except to point out that the Pearl has been rejuvenated by its move to 42nd Street near the Hudson (Signature's old space). Though the audience is still dusty, the shows aren't.

Christopher Marlowe swipped the autumn from Shakespeare with a memorable epic staging of Tamburlaine pts 1 & 2. This month his legendary tragedy gets a remount for NYC audiences. This is the Elizabethan ur-play, the one that lifted theater to another level. Problem is, the grand speeches about the cosmos and damnation are interrupted by SFX and clowning. That's why it's been done maybe twice in NYC in living memory: in 1965, and before that by a kid named Welles for the WPA in 1937. Chris Noth, of all actors, takes the title role. The closest he's come to classical theater is some Shaw in 1990…

(May 29 - July 2)

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Shakespeare as a rock-musical god is about half of Something Rotten(photo: Joan Marcus)

Twenty-something Shakespeareans do several shots and then stage a semi-improvised play. Or as they bill it, "a company of professional drinkers with a serious Shakespeare problem." A minor phenomenon in the Theater District, Drunk Shak is the sort of fun gimmick that proves NYC can find a place for hardworking thespians even when they don't have connections or a budget. It runs all summer long, a potential rainy-day alternative to free Shakespeare in the parks.

(May -Sept 6)

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Hamlet

Classic Stage Company

In Austin Pendleton’s staging at CSC, Prince Hamlet (Peter Sarsgaard) follows an invisible spirit offstage then circles back moments later with his course set for vengeance. Throughout this production, Pendleton isn’t just banking on his audience’s familiarity with the play, he’s demanding it. His staging only works, when it works at all, through prior knowledge. At times it even seems like a Hamlet in quotes, a sort of three-hour setpiece. It’s abstruse, remote, and finally inaccessible. More words here!

There's accessible Shakespeare and then there's the Mobile Shakespeare Unit. This program, run by the Public, literally stages shows out of a van! The team will schlep Will's great tragedy out to community centers, prisons, and homeless shelters around the five boroughs in early May. Then they'll come home to Lafayette for a brief run. The staging is bare-bones (a boom box usually provides music), but the playing (invariably by a diverse cast) is always clear and brisk. The price can't be beat—$20 at the door. And one of my favorite under-known Shakespearean actors, Jennifer Ikeda, plays the Lady of the play!

A fluffy musical comedy set in the Elizabethan theater, Something Rotten is notable mainly for being a Broadway show not based on some prior work. Instead it imagines a pair of Elizabethan playwrights who anachronistically invent musical theater to compete with Will Shakespeare. So Rotten isn’t exactly groundbreaking: this is the schticky sub-genre of musicals-about-musicals(e.g. The Producers, Spamalot). The creative team is a question mark, with the musical elements coming from Hollywood types; a book by a big-in-Britain comedy writer; and direction/choreo by Casey Nicholaw (The Book of Mormon). The big draw is Christian Borle, who earned his Tony for Peter & the Starcatcher, and who here plays the Bard, but Brian d’Arcy James is no slouch onstage either.

The Delacorte, the quintessential Shak in the Park, turns into an island paradise for its first offering. Sam Waterston has probably lost count of his appearances there—the first was As You Like It in 1963 and the last, I believe, was Polonius in 2008. Here he plays Prospero, natch, which he played to infamously bad reviews way back in the early 1970s (his Miranda was Carol Kane!). Michael Greif directs—he once did a lovely R&J at the Delacorte, so this should look picturesque and play well.

One of the essential English classics that gets crowded out by Shakespeare's dominance. It offers a great pair of leads—its last NYC revival in '92 had Val Kilmer and Jeanne Tripplehorn at the Public—plus some honestly great poetry, dark dark psychology, and several astonishing scenes. Usually (but aptly) described as "What if Romeo and Juliet were siblings?", Tis Pity is decadent but ironic about it: the incestuous couple are just about the only heroic models in a corrupt Italian court. And the Red Bull can be relied on for an inventive sense of theatricality and willingness to get dark. And Tis Pity is dark even by Jacobean standards. Plus it's got one of the most memorable titles in theater history!

Twelfth Night, a play that revels in gender ambiguity, is perfectly suited to Bedlam’s fluid method of staging classics. They dub one version What You Will while its twin, Twelfth Night, plays in rep—same cast, different roles. To make the play even more protean, the company double-cast Viola in one version, and swap her gender in the other. More words here and there, plus an interview!

Fiasco pivots quickly from an acclaimed Into the Woods to present the rare Two Gentlemen. This company made a strong impression a few seasons ago with Cymbeline of all plays, and their Woods extended their style into a non-Shak avenue. The tight camaraderie of the ensemble, a flair for play-acting and for imaginative use of props and bodies, and an approach that foregrounds character rather than versification all make Fiasco a distinctive and potentially trend-setting company. They’ve picked a challenge with Two Gentlemen. It’s a very early one in Shak’s career, full of self-serious poetic romance and broad clowning comedy. It’s very rare to see—in fact, it’s one of only three plays by our man that I’ve never seen! So I’m looking especially forward to seeing what Fiasco does with it.

(April 24 - May 24)

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Wolf Hall, pts. 1 & 2

Royal Shakespeare Company

on Broadway (Winter Garden Th.)

I'd include Wolf Hall just because it's the RSC. But the first novel in Hilary Mantel's historical series also covers the same period of history as Henry the 8th, from Cardinal Wolsey's alliance with France to the birth of Anne Boleyn's daughter Elizabeth. More generally, Mantel follows Shak in the way she dramatizes history. This double bill plays out a set of tragic arcs in the English kingdom, by staging a succession of political maneuvers over a decade-plus of time. On the RSC tip, this production is up for several Olivier Awards: best new play and lighting design, plus director Jeremy Herron, and Nathaniel Parker for his King Henry. As a lover of history plays, I'm looking forward to this one. See also my historical guide on Playbill Online!

About Me

I'm a freelance critic and dramaturg living in the NYC area (and available for hire!). I believe that plays should challenge the intellect and tickle the wit as well as stimulate the senses. They should tackle the most urgent social, political, and cultural subjects.
My tastes often run towards classic work but they also pull towards the avant-garde. My greatest challenge is to square my love for classics with an urge to look forward.
Also, I seek out theater with elements of science and science fiction onstage. My love for these themes and tropes stems from a belief that they're essential to understanding and reflecting life in the 21st century. Sci fi is also a popular narrative form that can champion free and unconventional thinking and inclusiveness.